president obama is also maintaining his lead in nevada. in iowa, president obama is still ahead. the national average is closer, but president obama has been on the rise there as well. so early voting has been going on for weeks now. in some states, and there are some interesting numbers on party breakdown of early voters so far. now, most early voters have been identified as democrats in ohio, nevada, iowa, florida, and north carolina according to the associated press. republicans have the edge in colorado. let's turn to bob shrum, professor of public policy at nyu and contributor to the daily beast. great to have you with us tonight. let's leave the names out of it for a moment. obama and romney. let's just take candidate a and candidate b. who would you want to be right now with the numbers playing? >> you would want to be candidate a assuming that's the unmentionable who is the president of the united states. he has a lot of roots to 270 electoral votes. if you look at candidate b, candidate b isn't even going to florida in the next few days. you can interpret that in one of